BREAK THE CHAINS OF OPPRESION AND THE YOKE OF ...

Ethics ed the following recommendation to its member churches: “As our commitment
on confessing our faith in the face of economic injustice and ecological
destruction, ... WARC recommends ...: 2.2 Support governments to achieve
fair and sufficient taxes in order to guarantee basic needs and a life of dignity
for the population, to reach the UN Millennium Development Goals and to
fulfil the obligation of providing social welfare. … 2.6 Enforce present and create
new laws against all forms of criminal economic activity such as … tax evasion,
money laundering and illegal employment, which deny the rights of the
poor.” 13
Tax justice is the key value of tax ethics. As outlined below, the following principles
can be seen as global principles of tax justice while respecting that their
implementation still allows contextual and diversified tax systems and even to
some extent a tax competition between states or regions. Tax ethics is and has to
be implemented in various tax principles as they are known, or should be further
developed in tax laws:
1. The Principle of Generalness: every taxable citizen is obliged to pay taxes as
an expression of equal treatment and justice as equality.
2. The Principle of Capability: Tax payers should be charged on the basis of
their economic capability and performance. This is an expression of capability-related
justice and performance-related justice. Wealthy persons
should contribute more to common public tasks than poor persons, not
only in absolute, but also in relative terms.
3. The Principle of Regularity: the state cannot take taxes in an arbitrary
way, but has to tax based on predictability which is part of procedural justice.
4. The Principle � of �Redistribution: � Progression � in �taxing
income or revenue
leads to a relative higher taxation of wealthy than of poor people. This is
ethically justified because the needy, such as people without food or education,
need support. Needs-related justice means distributive justice, also
called social justice, which respects differences in performance while balancing
the needs of those who cannot perform in the same way such as
elderly, poor, handicapped and sick.
5. The Principle of Coherence: The different forms of taxes and policies have to
be coherent and non-contradictory. It would be incoherent to reduce, e.g.
income taxes for poor people, and at the same time charge them with additional
consumer taxes. Coherence is an ethical requirement for credibility
and trust as well as for a holistic implementation of a set of values. Nevertheless,
full coherence is never possible because politics is always a battle
field of balancing conflicts of interests, compromises and contradictions.
13 Accra 2004. Proceedings of he 24th General Council of he World Alliance of Reformed
Churches, Geneva 2005, 199-201.
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– CLIMATE JUSTICE AND TAX JUSTICE – 91